Conspiracy theories and cults

[trenton]

I don't know if actualized has made this connection or not yet, but I want to make it explicit. There are considerable overlaps between grand conspiracy theories and cult behavior. I say "grand" because my position is that small local conspiracies are regular whereas coordinated intergalactic conspiracies by lizard people lack sufficient proof. Those who have contemplated this probably already noticed.

A cult is in a sense a major conspiracy that is often relatively organized such that it hides abuse even when it is against a large number of people and is severe. It often includes sex trafficking, labor trafficking, and forms of coercion that make people afraid to leave. They extract people for money and can trap their children in a fate so undesirable that a mother can't stand to watch her children become pawns in the scheme, forcing her to leave them behind along with her husband.

The way the cult maintains itself is essentially through conspiracy theories. Any outside information is claimed to be manufactured by those in power to discredit the organization that threatens them. The government for example, is claimed to be covering up child sex traffickers and pedophiles and that they are inventing lies about the cult to attack their legitimacy  them. By controlling the media, they make everybody thinks the group is terrible while they are fighting against this dangerous evil. Meanwhile, the cult is basically where the conspiracy theory should be applied as they exploit lots of people in an organized manner. The cult is the very thing it claims to fight against in its conspiracy theories.

I witnessed this when I visited the church of scientology. I started asking a lot of questions about how the ideology is structured, what they believe, why, and so forth. I seem to have gotten a lot of surface level answers without much depth. They didn't mention the psychiatry until much later.

I told them that I had done some research on scientology. I said that there were several past scandals that the church was responsible for. There is a lengthy list of controversies here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology_controversies

When I told them about things of this nature, they told me that they never heard of it. They maintained that those in power were oppressing them by spreading lies and manipulating the media. These were reports from multiple countries, not just one government. This would require a grand conspiracy to fake.

I saw some inconsistencies in terms of how they addressed other religions. On one hand they maintained that they welcomed all religions and appear to have embraced some form of subjectivism, but at the same time they have a symbol clearly based on the cross. My grandma seems to have been concerned about how Jesus was depicted as an ancient spiritual teacher rather than literally God. She wanted to maintain that Jesus was God, meanwhile I was skeptical that the church would take a stance on Jesus in this way if they were supposedly open to all religions while embracing some form of spiritual subjectivism. I sensed some kind of contradiction in that they wanted to claim freedom from ideological influence while having an ideological agenda in the conclusions being drawn.

There was a meeting about past lives after having drinks and snacks. There were a few videos that I didn't find very convincing. To me it seemed like a few rare isolated incidents or coincidences in which a person meets someone and claims to know them. You can let me know what you think about past lives, but I'm not sure about it. We played some kind of memory game in which we pretended to be acting out past lives. People seemed to find the whole thing funny.

I had a ton of questions, but there wasn't enough time to answer them. Once the meeting was over, we were given papers to discuss what we intended to work on. I told them about my situation and it immediately closed doors. I told them about PTSD from child abuse and psychiatric complications such as hospitalizations linked to depression treatments. Apparently for my situation past lives wouldn't help and people who took medicine arouse suspicion from the group. They didn't tell me why though.

They then tried to sell me a book even though scientology doesn't apply to me. It did not add up. Maybe cults are bothered by people who ask a lot of questions and seek the truth. The sales pitch seemed second nature to them as they still want you to buy something.

From this experience, maybe we can say a problem with conspiracy theories is that they can be used by people with ulterior motives to disengage critical thinking and allow them to insert a narrative in which counter evidence is easily dismissed. It seems to be a very reliable method for producing close mindedness.

At the same time, I have also witnessed frame up situations in which a victim was framed by falsified evidence or a set up by organized criminals. For some reason these conspiracies are taken much less seriously including in a court of law. There is no sufficient investigation, but it does happen frequently. This would be close mindedness in the opposite direction when a court refused to recognize the evidence as compromised and manipulated. Identity theft is a simple and common example of people imprisoned due to a conspiracy by organized criminals.

It looks like the problem is that conspiracy theories if used a certain way, create a closed loop with an unfalsifiable position. Courts don't seem to want to allow people to make unfalsifiable positions even if the consequence is that innocent people are routinely jailed due to frame ups. This is why I along with many people I met simply don't believe the propaganda of "innocent until proven guilty." The trial is more like a formality rather than a genuine inquiry into the truth of the situation.

I remember that there is supposedly a distinction between a conspiracy and a conspiracy theory. I'm not sure what the distinction would be. If someone would like to clarify this, then that might help. I seem to be split from actualized on the point that conspiracies happen constantly on smaller scales, but grand conspiracy theories seem to be what is actually being criticized as they feed cult dynamics such as in the case of trump supporters crying "fake news."